Share this:

James Damore, a former Google employee who wrote a controversial diversity memo, appears alongside attorney Harmeet Dhillon during a press conference Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif., announcing a lawsuit against his former employer. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

The former Google engineer whose firing inflamed America’s culture wars is abandoning his lawsuit against the company in favor of arbitration. Two men who joined the suit will continue the court fight, the report said.

For Google, as with most companies being sued by employees, the move into arbitration was a victory, Damore’s lawyer Harmeet Dhillon said. “They all would prefer to handle these things secretly and with no right of appeal,” Dhillon said, adding that plaintiffs in a court process also have more rights than in arbitration to obtain information from companies they’re suing.

A Supreme Court ruling in June that essentially changed the law around class-action suits about working conditions led Damore to agree to arbitration, Dhillon said.

The trend of companies requiring employees to sign agreements to arbitrate workplace disputes, rather than going to court, significantly restricts workers civil rights in areas including age, disability and minority rights, Dhillon said.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

James Damore was ousted last year from his software-engineering job over an internal memo he wrote suggesting women may be biologically less suited for technology jobs.

Google’s termination of Damore made him a darling of the alt-right, sparked an aborted plan for a demonstration at the digital-advertising giant’s Mountain View campus, and put the company in the crosshairs of U.S. conservatives alleging Google was systematically crushing free speech.

In his lawsuit, filed in January in Santa Clara County Superior Court, Damore claimed Google discriminates against men, conservatives and white people, using “illegal hiring quotas” to employ a certain percentage of women and minorities. Employees who express views not shared by the majority of Googlers are singled out and punished, Damore alleged.

His lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, alleged at an earlier press conference that a “Lord of the Flies” mentality at Google meant an employee could be “singled out and then group shamed, bullied and fired.”

Upon Damore’s firing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo to employees that he’d been turfed for breaking the company’s code of conduct, which requires Googlers to “do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

Pichai said that much of what Damore’s memo expressed was “fair to debate,” but that portions of it advanced “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

The company has consistently denied that it discriminates against workers on the basis of their political views.

Another former Google employee, David Gudeman, joined Damore in suing Google, and will also move to arbitration, Dhillon said.

Three others later joined the suit. Two were former job applicants claiming they were denied jobs for being white men, and the third was a former Google employee. The two former job seekers, Stephen McPherson and Michael Burns, remain in the suit following Damore’s exit, while the former employee, Manuel Amador, has dropped his claims.

The arbitration in the cases of Damore and Gudeman could last more than a year before an agreement is reached or the arbitrator — a lawyer from a dispute-resolution company — issues a decision, Dhillon said.

Damore is seeking compensation for lost wages and alleged damage to his career and reputation, Dhillon said.

Ethan Baron is a business reporter at The Mercury News, and a native of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. Baron has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and photographer in newspapers and magazines for 25 years, covering business, politics, social issues, crime, the environment, outdoor sports, war and humanitarian crises.

A new report says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to "war" in response to criticisms of the company. And his new approach has led to friction with several top executives, including Sheryl Sandberg.